By A Correspondent It began, quite innocently, over breakfast at a star hotel in city. Coffee was being poured. Toast arrived on cue. Conversations hummed with the usual social politeness. And in one corner of the room, democracy was apparently being concluded. A tight circle had formed around a powerful figure from the government —…

Special Correspondent For nearly 15 years, elections in the Hyderabad Cricket Association have followed a depressingly predictable script: alliances stitched together before polling day collapse the moment results are declared. What follows is not governance, but guerrilla warfare — suspensions, counter-suspensions, court petitions, police complaints, factional press conferences, and eventually administrative paralysis. Instead of headlines…

Special Correspondent Serious concerns over the security of Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy have been raised by senior BJP leader Marri Shashidhar Reddy, who has formally written to the state Director-General of Police and marked a copy to the Union Home Ministry, flagging what he describes as alarming security lapses. At the centre of…

Special Correspondent The administrative turbulence within the Hyderabad Cricket Association (HCA) has taken yet another complicated turn, raising serious questions about governance standards, procedural propriety, and institutional credibility. What began as high-profile arrests over alleged financial irregularities has now evolved into a wider debate over due process, political influence, and internal power struggles. Arrests Without…

Special Correspondent If parliamentary conventions carried constitutional immunity, Indian politics would be far less noisy—and far more convenient for those who mistake designation for distinction. Unfortunately for such assumptions, the Indian Constitution is refreshingly blunt on one crucial point: it does not recognise the office of the Leader of the Opposition at all. Not by…

Special Correspondent Parliament has once again been paralysed—not over economic distress or a national security failure, but over selective leaks and political interpretations attributed to an unpublished memoir of former Army Chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane. The Congress-led Opposition’s decision to stall the Budget Session over unverified claims marks yet another low in its increasingly…

MS Shanker Parliament is often described as the temple of democracy. Temples, by definition, are places where fear has no role—only order, dignity, and constitutional sanctity do. That is precisely why an extraordinary statement by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla during the Budget Session deserves serious national debate, not silence. The Speaker publicly acknowledged that…